Synapsys Blog - April 2005

Building companies that last

From Built to Last by James Collins and Jerry Porras, a book about Visionary companies and how they come to be visionary, the authors say:
To stimulate growth Visionary Companies do the following:
1. Establish “BHAGS” i.e.: Big Hairy Audacious Goals
2. Try a lot of new Stuff
3. Live by “Good enough never is” ( or relentless self improvement).

In order to grow, companies need to think outside the box, say Collins and Porras. But can you define the “box” you want to think outside?

From Built to Last by James Collins and Jerry Porras, a book about Visionary companies and how they come to be visionary, the authors say:
To stimulate growth Visionary Companies do the following:
1. Establish “BHAGS” i.e.: Big Hairy Audacious Goals
2. Try a lot of new Stuff
3. Live by “Good enough never is” ( or relentless self improvement).

In order to grow, companies need to think outside the box, say Collins and Porras. But can you define the “box” you want to think outside?

Only companies that know intimately what they are already doing should set about “Trying a lot of new Stuff”. “Relentless self-improvement” requires ways of defining how we do NOW, against how we do tomorrow, and we can only find out the difference by taking transparent measurements or our current performance. So we need measurement processes that are easy to follow and give clear outcomes.

Sounds great? So where do you start? Start by measuring what you do now – realistically – no matter how badly. What are the activities that you do that make your business do business? What results in product or service sales do they gain? Where is the information held that can give you these measurements? Where do you collect the data? Do you collect the data?

Often even trying to focus on that simple option – measuring what you do – throws up a gaping hole in your systems. So you have to take a step back and ask: How can we collect the data? Use the help of professionals.

Don’t plunge in, acting on beliefs about how you do business and how that affects your business outcomes. You could end up changing things that don’t need changing and ignoring the obvious. Outside eyes see what you don’t. They can define the holes, but they can also spot the strengths and help you leverage these into business advantages.

Often the best solution is to bring in an outside company that is able to look at your business objectively and help you define the systems – where they intersect or overlap, where the opportunities are for obtaining good data and setting up a performance measurement system.

One of our clients needed to overhaul their sales system and integrate it into their manufacturing systems. There was a continual series of costly printing mistakes, with jobs having to be reprinted. As we worked through gathering details of their current sales procedures we realised there were several methods of processing orders and several points where changes were communicated to several different people. By highlighting these potential hazards for communication we were able to help them settle on a single sales “route”, thereby reducing the potential for mistakes.

Defining what we do leads to clear procedures; following procedures leads to changes where they are obviously not working. It is only then that you move into the next step - creating systems for relentless self-improvement.

To read a review of Built to Last go to ReadingGroupGuides.com. For more information about Collins and Porras go to the Derbyshire Business School’s list of Top 50 Business Thinkers page. This book is available new and used and as an audio cassette from Amazon Books.

Avoiding the Spam trap.

Email spam is an issue for business; it can take up man hours and time, which cost the company money.

One method spammers use to get your email is when you join a site you are required to submit an email address, some of these sites sell their email list to spammers.

The other method is spam bots or email harvesters. These are similar to search engine spiders in that they crawl the web looking for websites, but instead of looking for content and listing your website on a search engine, they are programmed to look for email address and send them back to the spammer’s server. This is what we will look at today.

The Catch-22 is your business needs to be easily contacted from your website; a contact page and/or email address is required. Making it hard for someone to contact you creates an unfriendly user experience and you will lose potential customers, but putting your email out there makes it a target for spammers. That's quite a catch, that Catch-22.... Read on.....

There are a few ways to combat the email harvesting bots and reduce the possibility of ending up on a spam list.

1. Use a contact form on your contact page.
Use a script that doesn’t require the recipients email address to be in the form (you may not see it, but it is there in the code for the spam bots to see).
Also, if you are using a common script such as formmail.cgi make sure it is set up to only accept requests from your server or it could be hijacked by a spammer and used to send out bulk emails using your account.

2. Confuse or block spam bots.
This can be done several ways using various script languages.
The spam bots scan the HTML code behind the page for email addresses; you can use script to hide the email address in the code but still display properly for a human.

JavaScript can be used to confuse some spam bots by breaking up the email address into parts or switching charaters and then writing it to the page (remember the spam bot will see the JavaScript code, not the result of the code)
Even better would be to not put the JavaScript directly into your page but to link to it as a .js include file. This method is independent of what platform you use to host you website.

The next method is to use server side scripts to detect the spam bots and block them. They can also be used to the same effect as the JavaScript method, a combination of both would be best just incase a new bot slips through undetected.
There are free scripts available for PHP and ASP with updated list of known spam bots and email harvesters from the links below.
You can even fight the spammers by poisoning their harvest with fake emails, just make sure you use a robot.txt on your server to block legitimate search engine spiders from crawling it.

A very good anti spam site fill of helpful links and information: http://spamlinks.net/spambots.htm

Some anti-spam measures to fight SPAM: http://www.kloth.net/internet/spam/

The Web Robots Pages: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Web Development 101

Several years ago web development was a boutique industry with technical skills a necessity. As the years have gone by, the skills needed for basic web development have slowly diminished to the point that, today, almost anyone can create a complete website in a matter of hours. Simple WYSIWYG authoring tools, such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, with their standardised interfaces are often no less usable than software people use on a daily basis (Word, for example) making the transition a painless one.

This evolution has opened the Internet up to a degree once thought impossible. The downside to this explosion is the growing number of sites that prove impossible or painfully difficult to navigate due to poor layout, flawed navigation, colour and formatting choices. To prevent these visual nightmares, here are a few basic tips for new web developers.

Fonts. Use a standard font such as Arial or Verdana. You may have a font on your computer that you've grown attached to, but there's no guarantee that users of your website will have the same font installed on their computers, making the resulting page they will see entirely unpredictable.

Use a font colour that contrasts well against your page background: black on white is always a safe choice. If the font and background colours are too similar, people will have difficulty reading your text. Neon fonts are a definite no-no.

Avoid italicised fonts as they are much harder to read, and try not to use more than two or three font sizes on the same block of text. Pages with many different font sizes make a site more difficult to read and visually chaotic (unless, of course, this is the effect you're looking for!).

Backgrounds. Neutral colours are best; yes, boring perhaps, but bright colours can be overbearing and reduce the legibility of text. Some browsers also refresh the page more slowly as you scroll down a page, which combined with a bright background may produce a flashing light-show that will have your users flying into epileptic fits en masse! Not really, but you get my drift. Oh, and if you decide to use a background image, don't watermark it, as this can be distracting when scrolling down long pages.

Navigation. Found a nice Flash or Java manu system have you? Feel free to use it, but make sure it isn't the only means of navigating your site. Many users won't have the plug-ins necessary to utilise them and will be faced by empty grey blocks rather than buttons. Put standard HTML links on the page just in case. Make sure that whetever primary navigation system you use remains the same on every page.

If the navigation layout changes on different pages you will have your users tearing their hair out in frustration. Lastly, bear in mind natural human interactions with the page. In most Western cultures people's eyes will be drawn to the top left-hand corner of the screen and then right, along the top of the screen. Your main navigation should ideally be near where they look first on your page.

Images. Always use an appropriate image compression format. If you're compressing an image with large blocks of the same colour (such as logos and most navigation buttons) use something like GIF. If you're compressing a photograph or complex image with lots of gradients, textures and highlights use JPEG. Using the wrong format will increase the file size dramatically. And try not to put more than 100KB of images on the same page; any more can cause aggravation for dial-up users (of which there are still many).

Finally, and this is a biggy, don't re-size an image on your page using the HTML size tags. If you shrink the oscreen size of a large image on your page (in pixels), the actual file size (in KB) still remains the same. This means that a very small image on your page may still take a very long time to download. Use something like Photoshop (or even Paint) to re-size the image instead, thereby preventing the need for me to throw things at my monitor and swear profusely when visiting your site. And don't increase the size of an image using the same tags. This will cause pixellation of the image, making it look grainy and jagged.

Contact pages. If you decide to put up a contact page, be cautious about plastering your email address on it. Trust me, it will be an unwelcome surprise when the spam starts rolling in. If you are able, use a contact form, or conceal your email address from spiders (those programmes that trawl through websites for content) using Javascript. Think about creating an email address specifically for the site; one that you can abandon if things go haywire.

General Usability. Try to maintain standardisation across your pages. This may mean spending some time coming up with a page template at the outset, but it will make things considerably easier for you and your site's users down the track. If you're coming from a print background remember to think broadly in squares and rectangles when designing a page. Circles and curves may look nice, but they're difficult to implement.

Consider the screen resolution of your users. Most people will be using a screen resolution of 1024x768 (pixels, width by height) or above, but there are still quite a few using 800x600 or less. If your page is wider than 750 pixels these users will be forced to scroll sideways to view the full width of the page. It's up to you to decide what compromises you make to accommodate varying resolutions, but try to avoid extremely wide tables or images as a rule.

If you use links, make sure they're clearly identified as links (underlined, for example) and make sure you don't use the same format for plain text (I hate it when people underline text on a site but it isn't a link, but that may just be me!)

Finally, remember that these are just guidelines. Many of them may be broken under the right circumstances with great results. Guidelines are a useful tool, but web development is as much an act of artistic creativity than a purely technical one! Now fly! Be free, my little grasshopper!

Print Production Process

Generally, when we work with a client interested in a print-based product, this is a general summary of the process Synapsys uses to make sure that we, and our client, understand our various roles and that the finished product satisfies the client’s needs.

1. Identify the Use and User of the product
2. Specify the content and ancillairy goals of the organisation
3. Create detailed timeline and budget
4. Determine the technical specifications for the product
5. Identify the visual elements and structure for the content
6. Development of the templates and content
7. Roll out and edit the content
8. Client proofs the product
9. Print files to printers
10. Final comments/feedback from client

Helpful links for more information on the print production process:
Document
Webpage
Webpage